Now, assassinating terrorist leaders is surely a commendable activity. The problem was with our subsequent actions. As usual, IAF resorted to targeted strikes in response to blanket attacks on our population centers. Such targeted strikes have very little deterrent effect, as we know. The balance, accordingly, is not good for Jews: eight people (foreign workers) were wounded in Israel while seventeen died in Gaza. With such a low casualty ratio, we cannot fight numerically superior Arabs.

The lesson is, when we target high-profile enemies, the IAF must be prepared to escalate quickly against major targets to decisively stop retaliatory attacks from Gaza. We should be bombing PRC headquarters and ammo depots when we kill their leaders, so that they realize that continued attacks would bring devastation on their military infrastructure. Indeed, this is not a bad thing to do periodically, anyway.

For about a year Egypt has been phasing out Israeli shipments of diesel fuel into Gaza. But thousands of tons of diesel cannot be smuggled through tunnels in canisters. That shows that, contrary to Egyptian assurances, the bulk of smuggled goods goes overland in trucks rather than through tunnels.

And so the blockade is meaningless, and negative PR for Israel is its only effect.

Israel is accused of killing 37 Palestinians, with no mention of the fact that almost all of them were terrorists on active duty, some on their way to launch rockets at Israel.  The report likewise accuses Israel of the mass killing of Syrians during two protests in May and June, without clarifying what those Syrians would have done to Jewish villagers had they not been stopped at the border with bullets.

Hamas and Fatah are tellingly accused of unfair trials and torture—in effect, of cracking down on their own terrorists who have veered out of control. The HRW mentioned hundreds of rocket attacks on Israel, which cannot be ignored, but preferred to miss the much more massive and lethal grassroots terrorism, including daily attacks on Jewish cars with rocks and firebombs.

We remember the outcry of three years ago, when they were fired in the opposite direction. Since then, the Arabs have fired white phosphorus shells at Israel more than a dozen times, but who has heard about that abroad?

Both sides can easily bring this conflict to a political resolution: the Arabs by sending suicide bombers, and Israel by massive bombing of their installations in Gaza. Nevertheless, leaders on both sides are comfortable with a simmering conflict that distracts their populations from real problems.

In the long run, the conflict is bound to flare up. Empirically, countries tend to settle important conflicts with either diplomacy or war, not sporadic violence—which grows unchecked and eventually explodes.

It would be nice for the IDF to clarify how many rockets the Iron Dome can deal with simultaneously—in reality, not in theory.

On the other hand, Hamas apparently had no shortage of cement for its bunkers, as evidenced by the hundreds of miles of tunnels it built into the Strip to prepare for the next war with us.

The Israeli response was typically meaningless—bombing a tunnel that was “intended for kidnapping.” Hey, if you guys knew about such a tunnel, why did you not destroy it before?

It is worth remembering that Dichter supported Sharon’s ill-fated withdrawal from Gaza five years ago. But how can a person so well informed be so silly as to suggest that Israeli occupation can rid Gaza of terrorists? We failed to do just that in Lebanon for eighteen years, and our success in the West Bank has been very limited, punctuated time and again by intifadas, grassroots terrorism, and Hamas activity.